The City Is More Than Human

An Animal History of Seattle

Frederick L. Brown

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780295999340
• eBook ISBN: 9780295999357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites' relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis. Throughout Seattle's history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Salmon Bay is perhaps the most prominent feature named for an animal today. Other such features exist, but are not widely known, such as Deadhorse Canyon and Wolf Bay.

2 Thrush, Native Seattle, 219–55; the X in Xwulch sounds like the German ch.

3 U.S. General Land Office, “Land Status and Cadastral Survey Records: Field Note Records,” cadastral survey field notes, 1862, Township 24 North, Range 3 East, available at Bureau of Land Management, www.blm.gov.

4 Scholars who address this paradox include Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, 1; Howell, At Home and Astray, 176; Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, 7–10, 238–42; and Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, 11–21.

5 Hoquet, “Animal Individuals,” 68.

6 I use the term pet throughout this book to refer to domestic animals kept primarily as companions or for other nonutilitarian reasons. I use the term livestock to refer to domestic animals kept primarily for their labor or for the production of meat, milk, eggs, honey, or wool. I am aware that the use of these terms runs the risk of reducing animals to the categories by which humans define them, yet the usage is difficult to avoid precisely because these categories are so important to the humans and animals considered here.

7 Recent overviews of urban history include Mohl and Biles, “New Perspectives in American Urban History,” 343–448; Katz, “From Urban as Site to Urban as Place.”

8 Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Hurley, Environmental Inequalities; Klingle, Emerald City; Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible; Isenberg, Nature of Cities; Miller, Cities and Nature.

9 Emel and Wolch, “Witnessing the Animal Moment,” 16.

10 Mason, Civilized Creatures; Kete, Beast in the Boudoir; Jones, Valuing Animals; Grier, Pets in America; Sanders, “Animal Trouble”; McNeur, Taming Manhattan; Wang, “Dogs”; Biehler, Pests.

11 Important edited volumes include Philo and Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places; Wolch and Emel, Animal Geographies; and Brantz, Beastly Natures. See also, Wolch, “Anima Urbis”; Shaw, “A Way with Animals”; Coleman, “Two by Two.”

12 Philo, “Animals, Geography, and the City”; Anderson, “Animals, Science, and Spectacle in the City”; Jennifer Wolch, “Zoöpolis.”

13 Atkins, “Animal Wastes,” 46; Watts, “Afterword: Enclosure,” 293 (emphasis in the original). The concept of sorting is certainly akin to Bruno Latour’s notion that people struggle, fruitlessly, to purify nature and culture one from the other, when ultimately the two are inseparable (We Have Never Been Modern).

14 Philo, “Animals, Geography, and the City,” 52.

15 On space and place, see Lefebvre, La production de l’espace; Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity; Soja, Thirdspace; Smith, Uneven Development; Klingle, Emerald City, 4–5, 282n4.

16 Shaw, “A Way with Animals,” 11; Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 30, 45; Nash, “Agency of Nature, or the Nature of Agency?” 67–69.

17 Ingold, “On the Distinction between Evolution and History,” 11.

18 For instance, historian William H. Sewell Jr. argues that “agency, which implies consciousness, intention, and judgment, is a faculty limited exclusively to humans.” Comment in “Nature, Agency, and Anthropocentrism,” an online discussion about Ted Steinberg in “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002), http://historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu/phorum/read.php?f=13&I=5&t=5. See also Gooding, “Of Dodos and Dutchmen,” 32–47.

19 One definition of agency in Merriam-Webster’s (10th ed.) is: “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.” One definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is: “The faculty of an agent or of acting; active working or operation; action, activity.”

20 This broad definition of agency, what some term the “agency of nature,” is used for example in the following: Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 30; Worster, “Seeing beyond Culture,” 1144. On actor-network theory, which proposes a broad definition of agency, see Latour, “Do Scientific Objects Have a History?” 76–91; Woods, “Fantastic Mr. Fox?” 199.

21 For a summary of many of these debates, see Kazez, Animalkind. See also Wasserman and Zentall, Comparative Cognition.

22 Smil, “Harvesting the Biosphere.”

ONE. BEAVERS, COUGARS, AND CATTLE

1 Curtis, Salishan Tribes of the Coast, 97–100; Miller, Lushootseed Culture, 11–13; Thrush, Native Seattle, 20–21; Eells, Indians of Puget Sound, 395, 410–11.

2 Entry dated May 12, 1833, Tolmie, Journals, 178–79.

3 Tolmie, Journals; Dickey, Journal of Occurrences.

4 Müller-Schwarze and Sun, Beaver.

5 Haeberlin and Gunther, Indians of Puget Sound, 25; Elmendorf, Structure of Twana Culture, 94; Larson and Lewarch, Archaeology of West Point, vol. 1, pp. 9–6 to 9–8.

6 Dickey, Journal of Occurrences, January 28, 1834, September 10, 1835.

7 Dickey, Journal of Occurrences, May 18, 1835.

8 Harmon, Indians in the Making, 13–42; Hyde, Empires, 89–145.

9 Vancouver, Voyage of Discovery, 2:229–30.

10 Boyd, Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence, 30–39, 57–58, 153–60, 262–78; Harris, Resettlement, 3–30; Klingle, Emerald City, 24; Igler, Great Ocean, 66–70.

11 Vancouver, Voyage of Discovery, 2:287.

12 U.S. Cour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: The Animal Turn in Urban History
• Introduction
• One Beavers, Cougars, and Cattle: Constructing the Town and the Wilderness
• Two Cows: Closing the Grazing Commons
• Three Horses: The Rise and Decline of Urban Equine Workers
• Four Dogs and Cats: Loving Pets in Urban Homes
• Five Cattle, Pigs, Chickens, and Salmon: Eating Animals on Urban Plates
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Methodology
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index